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Topic: [Unity][WIP] Project R.E.M.S. + Poll. (Read 6226 times)

Project R.E.M.S. (realtime, emergent, multi-tasking, simulator) is a shoot-em-up, I designed on Unity 5.0 sometime during college's programming competitionaround 2-3 years ago.

while the game did not even got close to winning (it was full of errors and looked totally different) I still decided to salvage the core concept and retry it once I learned a bit more on how to use Unity/C#

GAMEPLAY:

The core gameplay is simple, you control an (indestructible) red spaceship that orbits around a red core while both are surrounded by a green hexagon that spawns advancing enemy walls at random intervals. the red core itself is vulnerable to enemy fire and is only protected bya 2-layered shield, it's up to you as the red ship to take down as many advancing enemy walls and keep the red core intact for as long as you can.

The LONGER you remain alive, the HARDER it gets. (speed-wise)

Video demonstrating the gameplay in action.

(click to show/hide)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fl9L0AkbTa0[/youtube]

Here's the twist though: rather than moving the ship, when pressing left or right, the entire field moves around, keeping the spaceship alwaysat the top, if you see enemy fire coming from one side, it's best you move the field to position yourself accordingly.

FEATURES: (While there is a playable demo you guys can try as of today, it's not yet the full thing, expect even MORE changes as I carry on.)

(click to show/hide)

WHAT I HAVE SO FAR:+Title Screen (still missing 1 animation but is not crucial for integrity, will work on it.)+Core Gameplay (100% implemented, but can be enhanced, I WILL discuss this later on.)+Particle System for most explosions (smart-bombs excluded purposely)+Smart Bomb system+HARD MODE (You start in MELTDOWN instantly with only 3 bombs, no additional bombs, the core is NOT protected by a shield. )+Endgame options (to be expanded)+audio-tracks (about time don't you think? ;D of course some are placeholders and I'll work on this later on)+randomized audiotrack system, (everytime you play this game 1 out of 3 different tracks will play for that one game.)

INCOMING:-Main Menu ( STILL designing it, but won't implement until I sort out the other features.)-High Score system, (working on it as we speak, to be implemented on endgame options)-A finite survival mode (rather than just kill for score, in here it's kill to successfully end the game)-A port to Android (I'm aiming for 4.2.2 ;D)-Gyroscope Controls (to be seen and possibly discussed.)

WISHFUL THINKING:(the following I'd LIKE to implement, but with my current skill are possibly best left out.)

-Online Scoreboard (Will decided inbetween local and online, will depend on how well the project comes along.)

The game is at the moment only for PC, but if everything goes smoothly I'd like to port it to Android as an apk for 4.2 systems and above.there's no .exe yet because it still feels naked as I only have core features implemented but I'll probably release onewith the basics once it's done.

The file weights around 45-50mb give or take, and is neatly packed as a .rar compressed folder,in order to play it, simply select the .exe file inside.

CONTROLS:

The demo uses some simple controls.

Arrow Keys Left & Right = Rotates the Field.Z Key = shoots bullets.Left Shift = use a bomb (if you have any)Enter = Pause/Unpause the game.

Spacebar = starts the game (when viewing instructions)

CLOSING COMMENTS:

I know the game is FAR from finished, but releasing a demo with a taste of the main gameplay is a good way to show what's about to come later on,the finished game should have most if not all the features mentioned above implemented, while adding a fix or two along the way.

I hope you guys enjoy this demo, and hopefully I'll have an android version to upload as well ;D

1) right now it appears that the walls just spawn randomly. meaning that your ONLY methods of controlling difficulty is the spawn speed and the wall thickness. while this seems fine on the surface you end up with the same problem early versions of tetris did. if instead you designed some spawn patterns and selected form the patterns randomly you would have a much greater control over the difficulty of the game. example if one of your a patterns spawns a wall and then another wall with a slight delay on the other side you have a difficult spawn pattern. but the difficulty of that pattern can be adjusted by changing the delay.

2) give your player a hint as to where and when a wall is going to spawn. if the outer wall pulsed slightly just before emitting a wall you give your player a chance to plan their movement to best break them. if the size/brightness of the pulse was linked to the thickness of the wall emitted even better. also with this feature you give yourself yet another knob to adjust difficulty by lengthening or shortening the delay between the pulse and the wall being emitted. this kind of behavior will be especially important if you link enemy spawns to the rhythm / mood of the music.

as for your bomb mechanic I'd suggest starting with zero and gaining them after a number of kills. that required number of kills should go up with either the number of bombs you already have or with the difficulty, your giving your player a git out of jail free card. they should start with one nor should they be flooded with them as the difficulty goes up and they start getting more and more kills because the spawn rate is higher. The game should have the same number of bombs available per second through all difficulty levels, perhaps even getting bombs more slowly as the difficulty goes up (yet another difficulty adjustment knob, find your balance). Heck with that concept in mind you might want to link getting bombs to the number of seconds they have been playing, perhaps in addition to the number of enemy kills.

it looks like you might have a nice game concept here. with some polish and some play testing you'll have a great game for your portfolio. Get it our to play testers ASAP. the feedback you get will be invaluable.

« Last Edit: June 07, 2015, 07:16:03 AM by Ryex »

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1) right now it appears that the walls just spawn randomly. meaning that your ONLY methods of controlling difficulty is the spawn speed and the wall thickness. while this seems fine on the surface you end up with the same problem early versions of tetris did. if instead you designed some spawn patterns and selected form the patterns randomly you would have a much greater control over the difficulty of the game. example if one of your a patterns spawns a wall and then another wall with a slight delay on the other side you have a difficult spawn pattern. but the difficulty of that pattern can be adjusted by changing the delay.

Hmm this IS sort of true, as of right now, the only form of control I have over the enemy spawns are their overall speed (handled by the timescale, I know it's risky but givesa good clean solution to difficulty scaling) the spawn rate, basically I can determine what are the odds for one of the spawners to spawn an enemy wall, and number of enemieson-screen, the condition for the spawners is, as long as there are 10 or less enemies on-screen use the RNG to determine if you can spawn or not,

while it cannot be appreciated on the video due to the speed on which I destroy the enemies, the game is will only accept 10 (this value can be changed) enemies on-screenat any time, if the cap is reached, even if the spawner RNG rolled good spawn numbers, it would never spawn any more.

as for patterns, I figured it would be slightly more thrilling if it was all random, to counter unfair patterns I was actually thinking of adding a 1 second delay on the spawn (which would be affected by the scale, meaning it would not make the game TOO easy on a higher difficulty) to give the player enough time to react accordingly,

but all in all, I feel it would be best to try both methods and see which one yields better results.

2) give your player a hint as to where and when a wall is going to spawn. if the outer wall pulsed slightly just before emitting a wall you give your player a chance to plan their movement to best break them. if the size/brightness of the pulse was linked to the thickness of the wall emitted even better. also with this feature you give yourself yet another knob to adjust difficulty by lengthening or shortening the delay between the pulse and the wall being emitted. this kind of behavior will be especially important if you link enemy spawns to the rhythm / mood of the music.

This one did kinda slip off my mind didn't it? yup it's a good idea if I implant it should it be based on rhythm but sadly I lack the proper experience to do this one, I'll probablysave it until later one when I learn how to import MP3's & detect wavelengths.

as for your bomb mechanic I'd suggest starting with zero and gaining them after a number of kills. that required number of kills should go up with either the number of bombs you already have or with the difficulty, your giving your player a git out of jail free card. they should start with one nor should they be flooded with them as the difficulty goes up and they start getting more and more kills because the spawn rate is higher. The game should have the same number of bombs available per second through all difficulty levels, perhaps even getting bombs more slowly as the difficulty goes up (yet another difficulty adjustment knob, find your balance). Heck with that concept in mind you might want to link getting bombs to the number of seconds they have been playing, perhaps in addition to the number of enemy kills.

Hmm this one's a good one, originally I planned on having just 3 for a single playthrough and have the player decide when it was a good time to use them, but then I realizedhow stale of a run would be if a player decided to save them for a harder part only to accidentally die before using them, hence the poll, what I had in mind with gaining bombsbased on number of kills would be, something like this: 50-60 Kills + X where X would be rising by 10 for every bomb gained, eventually I would cap X to 140-150 in order to have the player kill 200 enemies to gain a bomb late game. and of course, cap the number of bombs you can carry up to 3 at a time. (I'm actually debating this one, should it have a cap of 3 or keep it unlocked for players who want to hoard them for later on?)

it looks like you might have a nice game concept here. with some polish and some play testing you'll have a great game for your portfolio. Get it our to play testers ASAP. the feedback you get will be invaluable.

Thanks I know it's still in a very early development stage but with some polish, bugfixes and good music, I'm pretty sure this could be a good game for android/PC especially forpeople who play old-school arcades/get on the bus a lot.

oh that reminded me.... the wall thickness you talked about, it's not that the wall is thick it's that the RNG decided to apparently spawn 2 walls close together giving the illusion ofthem being 1 thick wall, I'll probably address this issue on the next update, thank you very much for pointing this one out

Hopefully with the next update (with a test .exe included) I'll have enough content to move this thread into an active project and possibly recruit some play-testers.

Hmm this IS sort of true, as of right now, the only form of control I have over the enemy spawns are their overall speed (handled by the timescale, I know it's risky but givesa good clean solution to difficulty scaling) the spawn rate, basically I can determine what are the odds for one of the spawners to spawn an enemy wall, and number of enemieson-screen, the condition for the spawners is, as long as there are 10 or less enemies on-screen use the RNG to determine if you can spawn or not,

while it cannot be appreciated on the video due to the speed on which I destroy the enemies, the game is will only accept 10 (this value can be changed) enemies on-screenat any time, if the cap is reached, even if the spawner RNG rolled good spawn numbers, it would never spawn any more.

as for patterns, I figured it would be slightly more thrilling if it was all random, to counter unfair patterns I was actually thinking of adding a 1 second delay on the spawn (which would be affected by the scale, meaning it would not make the game TOO easy on a higher difficulty) to give the player enough time to react accordingly,

but all in all, I feel it would be best to try both methods and see which one yields better results.

Think about it this way. if you design your patterns you have a chance to both fine tune the difficulty and ensue that the game is constantly thrilling by eliminating the spawn patterns that are not interesting. if your RNG decides to just pump out wall after wall in the same spot that's boring. you can make a lot of different patterns if you wish so It's not like it would be less interesting than RNG, RNG is still involved. But you do ensure that your spawn patterns are never boring, TOO easy or TOO hard for the difficulty. your limit of ten enemies spawned isn't actually all that helpful when you think about it. what if all ten were spawned as close together as your time scale would allow spread out through all the spawns? would that not be an extreme challenge even at early difficulties?

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Successfully added a particle system, now whenever an enemy wall is destroyed a brief particle explosion is seen,

I also attempted to take Ryex's suggestion and tried adding patterns.... surprisingly enough, the way I handled the script that spawned enemy walls somewhat made it easy to add patterns + hook them up to the RNG,

HOWEVER I did ran into a brand new (and annoying) fork in the road, while the system DOES indeed now spawn patterns from a pool of possible patterns randomly, it spawns them all at once, apparently it has no delay, the only saving grace is that at least my"only 10 enemies on-screen at once" rule still applies, so to soften the blow I added a brief delay between spawns but stillhas some tendencies to go all out on the player from time to time.

I also slightly sped up the player movement + decided to change player bullets on-screen from 1 to 3.

I guess I'll handle the speed/delay issue a bit later on when I start thinking about it a bit more clearly, but until then I'll move onwith the endgame conditions (the red core exploding) + high score logic.

Your probably going to have to change how you do the enemy spawning then.

my suggestion would be to make the entire spanner one game object with one attached script. write up a method to spawn a enemy wall from an arbatray section of the spanner using some sort of argument to identify the section. then your patterns can be written up as arrays of section numbers and delays. then with your spawn code write it up so that every X amount of time it attempts to spawn a pattern. there should be some constraints on if the pattern begins spawning based on if there is a pattern spawning already. you might want to control pattern spawns by creating an invisible game object and attaching a script to it that controls the spawn of a passed along pattern then destroys itself.that way you could set up a roll like "only one pattern spawner can be in the scene at a time"

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First and Foremost, the game now has proper patterns that spawn at a fixed rate (the delay gets shorter on higher difficulties intentionally)while it is also possible to customize patterns adding them to a pool of pre-made patterns that the RNG manages.

Secondly we now have Smart-Bombs

1 Smart-Bomb is given to the player for every 50 + X kills he/she scores (where X starts at 0 and is increased by 10 for every bomb gained during gameplay)whenever the player triggers a smart-bomb a shock-wave is created from the center of the field that expands towards the edges, instantlydestroying any advancing enemy walls it comes into contact (pretty much clearing the area)

seeing how it's relatively easy to get a smart-bomb at the start (50 kills, and by this point you might be going from normal to hard difficulty)it's a good strategy to save them for when you reach a higher difficulty, have most of your shield destroyed or when X is already at 40+ invalue.

Next up we also have the endgame screen already done.

basically once your core blows up, (taking all the objects in the screen with it) the endgame screen (still a WIP) appears,as of right now I only have it ask the player if he/she wants to continue or quit the game, eventually I'll also add a local high-score system(similar to that of flappy bird / super hexagon where if your current score > high score, the screen instead tells you, that you've reached a new high-score)

Also a small update on the particles, while I did spawn them successfully they seemed to always explode in the same exact pattern which kindamade the explosions look stale, now the patterns are totally randomized and look a lot better.

And to give people something to anticipate, here's a brief vid with the new updates in place, NOTE: smart bombs ARE implemented here, but there's no HUD element for them (yet...) hope you guys enjoy ;D

(click to show/hide)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOHPnDejOl4[/youtube]

To sum things up here's a new updated list of all the features my project has at the moment, while also showingfuture updates to work on:

(click to show/hide)

WHAT I HAVE SO FAR:+Title Screen (not shown in the vid, there's a transition but it's disabled atm)+Core Gameplay (95% done, bombs need HUD elements)+Particle System for most explosions (smart-bombs excluded)+Smart Bomb system+Endgame options (to be expanded)

INCOMING:-Main Menu ( STILL designing it, but won't implement until I sort out the other features.)-High Score system, (working on it as we speak, to be implemented on endgame options)-Music & SFX (For the next update I'll probably have a placeholder to show.)-Jukebox (once I have a good set of music tracks I'll work on this)-A finite survival mode (rather than just kill for score, in here it's kill to successfully end the game)-HARD MODE (You start in MELTDOWN instantly with only 3 bombs, no additional bombs, the core is NOT protected by a shield. )-A port to Android (I'm aiming for 4.2.2 ;D)-Gyroscope Controls (to be seen and possibly discussed.)

WISHFUL THINKING:(the following I'd LIKE to implement, but with my current skill are possibly best left out.)

-MP3 recognition, (While I cannot implement it anymore as part of the core gameplay (script issues) I'll try to at least make itso that players can overwrite the game music with their own)-Online Scoreboard (DISCARDED: Local score is good enough.)

And to wrap things up: should the next batch of updates get implemented successfully, If possible by the end of this week(or the start of the next one) I'll have an .exe (and hopefully an .apk) to download over here

To the Mods:

Once the demo .exe is released, would you please consider moving this topic from "New Projects" to "Projects"?(assuming all the requirements are met) not only would this help the project get a bit more notoriety but also helpme find play-testers more easily to keep polishing the overall project, thanks in advance

Looking good. I can tell your using patterns now which is awesome. Lets your players try to think up strategy better. though your a little sparse on variety but that's ok for now your still in development you don't want to flood your testers with a variety of patterns and not be able to tell which ones work and which ones don't Look forward to a playable version (perhaps with spawn for shoadowing?)

and, Yes. as soon as you have an exe the topic can be moved to the projects section. though you might want to do some formatting on the first post before we do.

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I have finally completed and uploaded a special demo you guys can try,

you can download this demo on the updated first comment on this topic

it's NOT the full game, as it lacks several features and modes I plan on implementing later on, while it also hasplaceholder music that I WILL change before even releasing the full thing (royalty free chiptunes are a pain to find)

but until then, enjoy this free demo and post your high scores / questions / bug reports / enthusiasm / etc... if you can

Congrats you've moved to the Main Projects section. Do you want the Pool removed too?

I played the demo, it's actually pretty fun, you implemented the wall flash before the spawn too which is nice, personalty Think it need to last longer and have more of a delay before the walls actually spawn but I still lets you notice before the wall is there and moving which is good. The difficulty ramp up is a little off, right now the easy section lasts a lot longer than the harder sections and there is almost no warning before the Difficulty spike. The Met down difficulty is also exponentially harder than the previous the difficulty need to be spaced out and ramp smoother. perhaps if there was a small lull in the spawning between difficulty changes, perhaps with some text in the center of the screen for a second to let players know it would feel better to. right now it just dumps you into the higher difficulty while enemies form the previous difficulty are still on the screen.

Took me a bit to figure out the controls, you might want to go with something more standard like the space bar, enter key, or even alt/ctrl. At least give a hit as to what does what. still didn't figure out the bombs yet.

Once I figures out the controls It actually plays pretty well. I think spawning multiple ways at once should be avoided though, even a small delay would feel more natural and allow me to develop a flow. one you let the player develop a flow you can purposefully write patterns that break the general flow to add difficulty.

Thats' all my sage advise for now. Keep up the awesome work.

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Congrats you've moved to the Main Projects section. Do you want the Pool removed too?

Thanks as for the poll, rather than remove it, I figure I can still use it, I'll simply change the question to something more up to dateas apparently there's still many things I can ask CP around to improve overall gameplay.

I played the demo, it's actually pretty fun, you implemented the wall flash before the spawn too which is nice, personalty Think it need to last longer and have more of a delay before the walls actually spawn but I still lets you notice before the wall is there and moving which is good. The difficulty ramp up is a little off, right now the easy section lasts a lot longer than the harder sections and there is almost no warning before the Difficulty spike.

You've noticed it as well? I guess I do need to tweak the duration of each difficulty wave,

but just as an info-dump, here is the current difficulties list of my game:

The Met down difficulty is also exponentially harder than the previous the difficulty need to be spaced out and ramp smoother. perhaps if there was a small lull in the spawning between difficulty changes, perhaps with some text in the center of the screen for a second to let players know it would feel better to. right now it just dumps you into the higher difficulty while enemies form the previous difficulty are still on the screen.

I kinda do agree on the whole difficulty changes instantly, I'll probably work on a more visual cue + wipe all current enemies on field (no free kills though)with luck this will be added on the next release.

Took me a bit to figure out the controls, you might want to go with something more standard like the space bar, enter key, or even alt/ctrl. At least give a hit as to what does what. still didn't figure out the bombs yet.

hmm, I thought I did place the controls on the first post, but oh well, I'll probably re-map shooting to be done with the spacebar, bombs with Alt, and pause... well Enter seemsto work fine.

as for the smart-bombs, while you detonate one with the spacebar (as of this demo) you need to have at least 1 bomb in the HUD or else spacebar does nothing.

everytime you kill an enemy, aside from getting +1 kill, you also gain a silent +1 to the bomb counter, when the bomb counter reaches 50 on the first time, you gain 1 bomb,however after gaining the bomb, you lose all bomb counters you've had and start from 0 again, also the bomb counter quota is increased by 10 each time you get 1 bomb.

first bomb need 50 points, second one 60, third one 70 and so on until it's capped at 100 points needed per bomb.

Once I figures out the controls It actually plays pretty well. I think spawning multiple ways at once should be avoided though, even a small delay would feel more natural and allow me to develop a flow. one you let the player develop a flow you can purposefully write patterns that break the general flow to add difficulty.

Thats' all my sage advise for now. Keep up the awesome work.

This one is kind of a double edge, the delay IS there, it's just not noticeable on higher difficulties due to how fast is going, I do have to agree on something though, the 2 patterns that spawn 3 walls at once ARE vicious, so I'll probably rework those, giving them some form of delay between them to create a more manageable pattern.

EDIT: Placing a delay over these 2 is not possible without breaking overall game integrity, I'll see if I can reduce the odds (or downright disable) for these 2 patternsof spawning on higher difficulties.

but I do indeed appreciate all this feedback, I'll work on these fixes and update the first post once a more stable version is released.

QUICK EDIT: Added a new poll regarding changes that will happen on a new difficulty change.

This demo is an overall improvement over the previous release, featuring:

-A now working transition w/ loading screen (there had been some reports that after pressing enter on the main screen it froze, this fixes it a bit.)-Instructions at the start.-Bullets do not spawn unless the player is ready (by pressing spacebar)-there is now a visual cue when difficulty rises, -whenever the difficulty rises you the screen is cleared from enemies, but you don't receive any points, think of it as a breather.-some patterns are toned down a bit.

It has been a bit of time since I last showed a significant update, so here's the next one:

HARD MODE!!

That's right, aside from the normal mode, now my project features a new mode that instantly pits the playerinto a harder & faster stage than the previous one.

So what are the differences from normal mode and hard mode?

In HARD MODE the player starts with 3 bombs at their disposal, however they are no longer able to obtain new bombs from enemy kills unlike normal mode, only 3 bombs for the entire round so use them wisely.

The player's core is also SHIELDLESS! Unlike normal mode, if an enemy wall got past the player's invincible shipthe core's shield would take the incoming blow and be destroyed saving the core for that one impact.however during HARD MODE, the core starts unprotected from all sides and any single impact will end the game.

and to top it off, the game starts at the second-highest difficulty available, Meltdown, if the player managesto survive for 200 kills, the game bumps the difficulty into Infinity +1. it's a fight to the end from this pointforward.

HARD MODE is not intended for beginners as the game assumes you already know how to play + usesmost if not all the available patterns indiscriminately.

HOW DO I PLAY HARD MODE?

As of right now, the main menu has been updated so the player can select a mode before loading the round.

Clicking on NORMAL sends you to the normal mode stage where you start with a full shield, low speed, and increasing bombs.Clicking on HARD sends you to hard mode, hope I can see some of your records in the future

HARD MODE is nearly complete and is now in a phase of internal testing done by me, once I have finished working off all the bugsand errors, I'll update my demo link to show the latest file with hard mode included.

After letting this post gather some dust I decided to revisit it and bring extra updates,

for today's update I bring you....

Magnet Mode! (not the final name, I'm still debating this)

you're probably wondering... hey, so what's up with those 2 colors, and why is everything in Spanish?well to summarize,

Magnet Mode plays similarly to the game "Ikaruga" here's how it works, in Magnet Mode you controlthe invincible ship as you do in the existing normal and hard modes, but in this one your ship can changecolor with the push of a key, instead of having to destroy neutral yellow walls, this mode throws both blue and red walls at you, your ship can only destroy walls of the same color as itself, red walls aredestroyed by red bullets, and blue walls by blue bullets, not only do you have to protect yourhexagon, you now have to swap colors in order to successfully destroy a wall,what happens if you hit it with a wrong color? your bullet gets destroyed but not the wall, makesure you take the first 2 waves to practice swapping before braving into higher difficulties.

next off.... why is the HUD in spanish?

well at the moment in Mexico there is a national competition for overall videogame design, any citizenof Mexico can enter it, as long as the game follows certain guidelines and of course is original in termsof resources such as sprites, music etc + it NEEDS to be in spanish, hence the translated HUD.

I figured the game is stable enough to enter so I might as well give it a shot.

regarding Magnet Mode:

is it out yet? almost, not yet, I'm still working on game logic for this mode.

I'm also adding a Local Multiplayer Mode for Magnet Mode, (one player controls the red ship, another one controls the blue one,)

Tijuana's Hackathon is over, and I barely re-made my entry in 8 hours as a participant on the event, one thing led to another and eventually, my project won, ironically it was the only app that ran ata stable 60fps and didn't crash, were there other better ideas out there? totally, but seems this oneapparently had the upper hand that it wasn't a concept but rather a true .exe file people could run.

bonus points for it being addictive as one of the judges quoted.

here's a vid for your enjoyment everyone, I know it's in Spanish, but bear withme, it's pretty much straightforward in terms of gameplay: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvUaG09gbFI[/youtube]

Now, moving on, is there a download for this new update? not yet, mostly because I'm waiting formy entry to finish validation + I'm doing a brief translation to English for you guys,(if you would like the Spanish version instead, I'll also upload it as well.)

It appears most of the game is complete on the PC, so next up is a port to Android/IOS, dependingon stability and how well it plays on a phone.

Not sure if there are other things you want to work on with the game itself, but if you ever plan on doing a high-scores system, I would suggest changing the way points are earned. Combos/chains are all the rage. Could even do something like earning more points the closer the wall gets. Find some good sound effects that mesh with the music too.

Chains actually don't seems like a bad Idea actually, seeing as I can just run a check to determine proximity (based on being inside an invisible object)when inside, this invisible check, any kills done, yield a chain, any shots dumped outside of it reset it to 0.

while this does seem fine, I did kinda notice something,

on higher difficulties, say meltdown & infinity +1, most of the shots the player takes are near point-blank, meaning an almost endlessstream of chaining, I'd probably have to be more specific on when to chain or not, maybe losing a piece of the barrier also removes the current chain?

I dunno, it's a pretty good idea, and I could probably make it so the particles react to how high the chain is going,the only thing that's kinda stumping me atm is how to handle it from becoming too broken late-game.

In the late game, you're already scoring points faster than at the beginning. Not sure how chains would make that broken. Maintaining a high chain at those speeds is already an accomplishment in itself.

A chain should constitute as how long the player can maintain perfection. So no missed shots, no incorrect color shots, and no damaged core. Because bombs are rewarded quite infrequently (or never at all in other modes), I'd prefer they kept the chain intact but not add to it. Or, go into the weird and allow "exploding" chains with bombs that award the player with more points based on how big the chain was.

Re-watching the video again, another thing I came up with is scoring points based on how close to the center of the incoming object you hit. That would probably be better than the "closer it is, the more points it's worth" suggestion I had. This would have more of an impact at the beginning of the game rather than at the end, so it's entirely debatable. If you had a "slow-down" ability that gradually refills itself over time, I would push for this feature.

Just spit-balling ideas here. I would just like the score to not reflect how long I survived but rather how well I performed in general (of course, you can just present the player with a SCORE and OBJECTS DESTROYED at the end).

Congrats dude, seems like everyone's making progresses in their game design carrers and I'm here like , still I do agree that stability and performance are a key point when comparing games in a competition like thise, I'd say even more than "innovation" and as you could see the juris agree with me (or I agree with them).

I also agree on the stream system, I'd say a stream would break down, when missing a shot, when a piece of barrier is lost and when you fire a wrong shot.

Sorry for these delayed updates but college atm is pulling cheap shots whenever it can when it comes to surprise tests orsome other urgent crap,

anyways, update time!

for today's update: the (not yet completed) combo system.

similar to that of DDR/Stempania etc, the combo system works on how many walls you can successfullyshoot off without losing any pieces of your barrier, missing a shot, or detonating your bomb (this last one was done on purpose.)

the combo system is based on 4 tiers,

TIER 0 = Combos 5 to 99, rewards a x1.5 multiplier when the combo ends.(as seen on the pic above)

TIER 3 = Combos 300 and onward, rewards a x8 multiplier when the combo ends.(sadly I don't have a pic for this one, the only one time I managed to reach this wason a non-recorded playthrough and forgot to printscreen it.)

when a player has started successfully a combo, it can have 3 outcomes,

missing a shot: combo instantly ends, score is multiplied by tier, with no additional consequences.

getting a piece of your barrier eliminated (aka BREAK!): combo instantly ends, score is multiplied by tier, then gets a 0.5 penalty, cutting the potential score in half, (personally I find this rather nerve wracking onhigh difficulties, but then again this is more of a high risk, high reward deal.)

images: I had to slow down some gameplay to get a proper shot of this:

(click to show/hide)

and

and finally, using a bomb: combo ends instantly, score is multiplied by tier, then gets a final x2 multiplier addedto it, while it's not a significant boost on lower combo tiers, using a bomb on a higher tier grants far betterresults, however be advised that by the moment you have a steady tier 2-3 combo you're most likelyon a difficulty where having a spare bomb might be useful for survival.